COLD BAG POSTING: CHAIR OF COMMISSIONER, DEPARTMENTAL ENQUIRIES AWAITS APPOINTMENT!

Jaipur: The post of Commissioner of Departmental Enquiries is lying vacant for the past one month. More than one Commissioner can also be posted on this position and in the past there have been instances when there have been three Commissioner at a time as well. Moreover, only an IAS can be posted in this position. For the past six months, only one Commissioner - Rajendra Singh Shekhawat - was posted but he too was transferred on May 15 and since then DoP has not made any appointment.

Actually this posting is considered a ‘cold bag’ posting in the bureaucracy and some even consider it to be a ‘punishment posting’. Hence at times there are more than one commission.

Pritam B Yashwant and Mohan Lal Yadav were Secy and Special Secy, respectively, in GAD and both the officers conducted a mistake in one case and both of them , in December 2020, were thereafter posted as Commissioner Departmental Enquiries. An interesting episode happened with Pritam that he went on a one year long leave and when he returned to the same post in Nov 2022, the DoP did not even allot him a room to sit in and work for nearly a month and he stayed at his home!

Be it senior or junior, IAS have been posted on this post. In fact, Ravishankar Srivastava has served on the post for no less than four time and R. Venkateswaran thrice. Niranjan Arya served on this post from April 2015 to December 2018, a tenure of forty four months. Similarly, when the government changed, Praveen Gupta too was posted on this post. As of now, three Additional Commissioners and six Deputy Commissioners have been posted in Departmental Enquiries. Two RAS officers - Gunjan Soni and Suman Panwar - have been posted as Additional Commissioner last week.

It is being believed that in the new IAS transfer list a new Commissioner would be posted here and only DoP knows if there will be one or more Commissioners posted here. The bureaucracy is now eager to know who is being sidelined and posted on this post.